Introduction and Basic Principles
The term Rapid Prototyping (or RP) is used in a variety of industries to describe a process for rapidly creating a system or part representation before final release or commercialization. In other words, the emphasis is on creating something quickly and t
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Introduction and Basic Principles
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What is Additive Manufacturing?
The term Rapid Prototyping (or RP) is used in a variety of industries to describe a process for rapidly creating a system or part representation before final release or commercialization. In other words, the emphasis is on creating something quickly and that the output is a prototype or basis model from which further models and eventually the final product will be derived. Management consultants and software engineers both use the term Rapid Prototyping to describe a process of developing business and software solutions in a piecewise fashion that allows clients to test ideas and provide feedback during the development process. In a product development context, the term rapid prototyping was used widely to describe technologies which created physical prototypes directly from digital data. This text is about these technologies, first developed for prototyping, but now used for many more purposes. Users of RP technology have come to realize that this term is inadequate and does not effectively describe more recent applications of the technology. Improvements in the quality of the output from these machines have meant that there is a much closer link to the final product. Many parts are in fact now directly manufactured in these machines; so it is not possible for us to label them as “prototypes.” The term Rapid Prototyping also overlooks the basic principle of these technologies in that they all fabricate parts using an additive approach. A recently formed Technical Committee within ASTM International agreed that new terminology should be adopted. While this is still under debate, recently adopted ASTM consensus standards now use the term Additive Manufacturing. Referred to in short as AM, the basic principle of this technology is that a model, initially generated using a three-dimensional Computer Aided Design (3D CAD) system, can be fabricated directly without the need for process planning. Although this is not in reality as simple as it first sounds, AM technology certainly significantly simplifies the process of producing complex 3D objects directly from CAD data. Other manufacturing processes require a careful and detailed analysis of the part geometry to determine things like the order in which different features can be
I. Gibson, D.W. Rosen, and B. Stucker, Additive Manufacturing Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1120-9_1, # Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC 2010
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1 Introduction and Basic Principles
fabricated, what tools and processes must be used, and what additional fixtures may be required to complete the part. In contrast, AM needs only some basic dimensional details and a small amount of understanding as to how the AM machine works and the materials that are used. The key to how AM works is that parts are made by adding material in layers; each layer is a thin cross-section of the part derived from the original CAD data. Obviously in the physical world, each layer must have a finite thickness to it and so the resultin
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